the opportunity he was impressed with the developers. Two decades later, Cox finally would come to Maricopa. “I found the Rancho El Dorado group very straightforward in their approach to forming a partnership that formed the foundation for the success of Orbitel,” Anderson said. President John Schurz said the founders of Orbitel “believed in the city of Maricopa and its residents. There is a ‘Can Do’ spirit that permeates throughout the community. And, like Mike Ingram, Orbitel saw the potential in Maricopa.” Then Ingram received back-to-back doses of bad news. “The darkest day of my whole life was the day Arizona Public Service told me they wouldn’t bring me electricity,” he said. “Qwest said they wouldn’t bring fiber optics.” Electrical District No. 3 was serving farmers in the area with hydroelectric power. Ingram saw they did not have the capital or the know-how to bring thousands of homes online. So, he flew to California to convince Edison Power to partner with ED3 on a new utility company. “About that time, Qwest called after they saw the utility formed, and they said, ‘We’re on our way with fiber optics,’” Ingram said. Looking back, it might have been easy for Ingram to quit trying to open so many closed doors. “People didn’t believe in it. I would go to these meetings at these restaurants, and people would say I was the craziest man in the world,” he said. “We built this four-lane divided highway and thought we could build a town down there. I was absolutely the laughingstock of the real estate community.”
Ingram said if he had settled for the county standards, he wouldn’t have put in curbs and sidewalks and could have chip-sealed the roads. He said Maricopa would look like Arizona City today. Instead, he wanted standards like those in municipalities like Chandler and Gilbert. At Nathan’s insistence, the homebuilders agreed. Ingram was spending $14 million on The Duke golf course and another $3 million on landscaping for phase 1 of Rancho El Dorado and wanted quality homes to go with it. With no impact fees at the time, homebuyers could get an 1,800-square-foot home for what they would pay for a 1,300-square-foot home in Chandler. The homebuilders were just the first hurdle. Utilities had no interest in coming to Maricopa. When he had 1,103 lots in escrow with five homebuilders, Ingram went hunting for a water company. He went to Atlanta, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Dallas. “Nobody would put in a water company or wastewater,” he said. “So, we put in the water and the wastewater.” Eventually, Global Water agreed to take over most of Maricopa’s water system, inheriting those early lines. Ingram asked Cox to provide cable service. That was another no-go from a company that did not believe Maricopa would be a success. Then Ingram found Orbitel and talked its principals into being a partner in the venture. “Orbitel was certainly one my favorite projects of all time,” said Rick Anderson, a partner in Orbitel at the time. “Mike’s group had a great vision for Maricopa. I have never witnessed anything like growth in the early days of Maricopa.” Anderson said when he was asked to pull something together after Cox passed on
The widening of the section of Maricopa Road, newly named State Route 347, to two lanes in each direction was completed in 1996. Despite naysayers calling it a road to nowhere, Ingram knew it was vital to his plans. He started piecing together his properties, buying farmland from Smith and others. The need to believe Ingram knew he still needed a powerful real estate broker to bring in homebuilders. Each one he called in Phoenix shot him down, telling him Maricopa would just be a bunch of mobile homes. “In those days, all the interest was on Casa Grande,” he said. “I went to every broker in town and showed them my idea. And every broker except one said, ‘Mike, you’re absolutely crazy. You’ll never sell one lot. You’ll never sell one home until Casa Grande is completely built out. Do you not understand that Casa Grande has doctors, they have shopping centers, they have car dealers, they have dentists? You have a Circle K and Headquarters, and NAPA was there.’” The one broker who listened was someone Ingram did not want to approach in the first place. James “Nate” Nathan of Nathan & Associates brokered some of the biggest deals in the state, including Johnson Ranch, Power Ranch and Copper Mountain Ranch in Casa Grande. Ingram saw him as a major competitor. Nathan listened because he saw what Ingram saw: tiny Maricopa’s proximity to the East Valley and Sky Harbor. “You could tell growth patterns,” Nathan said. “He said, ‘I can’t list this with you because you’re going to take the people to those other places.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. It’s an emerging market.’” In 2000, Nathan and his partner, David Mullard, took the first phase of 1,000 lots and sold to three homebuilders. It took them just 10 weeks. Nathan said a top selling point was the newly widened road. “The affordability in the Southeast Valley was going away, just like it is again, and so Maricopa exploded,” Nathan said. Many homebuilders wanted to go cheap, building homes with carports and swamp coolers, roof-mounted air conditioners and composition roofs instead of tile. “Mike was like, ‘No, I’m creating a whole new city,’” Nathan said. “We went with the builders that Mike believed would build the quality product that he demanded. He never wavered from that once.”
ANNIVERSARY How Mike Ingram brought together the building blocks of Maricopa
Developer Mike Ingram ignored skepticism and followed his vision for Maricopa.
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mogul and John Wayne fan, who had purchased the Red River Ranch in 1980 from the late actor’s estate. “I need you to think about buying the Red River from me,” Eller told Ingram. “But I need you to close it in a week.” Eller had a loan with a local savings-and- loan company that had collapsed and been taken over by the U.S. government. He made a deal with Resolution Trust Company, the government’s asset-management company, to pay off the loan. Time was running short. He offered Ingram a fair price. “So, we bought the Red River in ’92,” Ingram said. “I had a love for John Wayne my whole life. When we bought El Dorado Ranch, I was real excited to be a part of that deal, the Louis Johnson and John Wayne history behind it and what that means to the whole community down there. And preserving that history, you just don’t have any idea what that means to me.” When El Dorado Holdings had Red River in escrow, Ingram received a call from Louis Johnson, Wayne’s long-time business partner in Maricopa, whose property was in the middle of Red River. Johnson said he wanted to be a partner in Ingram’s real estate plans and set him up with Willard Sparks, one of the largest commodity traders in the nation. Another partner, Dr. James Little, became
Jane Askew and Ann Donithan were hosting meetings in their homes to get property owners on board with widening the deadly, two-lane strip. Leading farmers Bill Scott and John Smith reached out to Ingram, getting the ball rolling for the Maricopa Road Association. “He recognized that we needed to have a four-lane highway coming out here,” Smith said. “So, we got together and posted a bond issue. We knew that the county wouldn’t help finance it. So, we voted on it, and it just barely passed.” In 1989, Arizona Department of Trans- portation was ready to accept the road if the association could raise half the money. “The citizens of western Pinal County all had a big, big part in making that happen,” Ingram said. “Alma Farrell was a big part of that. She had many, many meetings, actually gave me a place at Headquarters to work out of in those days. In a room between the bar and the restaurant, that was my little office there in Maricopa. And we went to work on it.” Former U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini brought federal money to the table. Pinal and Maricopa counties also came on board. Gila River Indian Community agreed. Property owners around Maricopa voted to tax themselves for the improvement district. “Mike worked hard, a lot harder than I did,” Smith said. In tragic irony, Jane Askew, who had been a passionate voice in widening the dangerous roadway, was killed in a crash on that very road in 1990. The main park in Rancho El Dorado is named in her honor.
IKE INGRAM IS NOT CRAZY OR stupid. That may be obvious to observers now, but 28 years ago,
many of Arizona’s most knowledgeable movers and shakers thought he was nuts. Now the chairman of El Dorado Holdings, which he founded in 1992, Ingram became one of the most influential people forming the modern history of Maricopa. After creating Rancho El Dorado and sister subdivisions The Villages and the Lakes, El Dorado Holdings still has thousands of acres in and around Maricopa set for residential and commercial development. It has thousands more acres in other communities it is also developing. But Maricopa continues to be Ingram’s baby. The work has been a combination of puzzle pieces and chess moves to find the right combination of partners and investors in what others thought was a hair-brained scheme. “I had this vision and plan for a new city there,” said Ingram, 78. “At the time, we had entitlements through Pinal County. There was no city of Maricopa. Maricopa was less than 500 people.” His first deal in real estate was with partner Marty Ortman, with whom he purchased El Dorado, a ranch formerly belonging to John Wayne near Stanfield. That gave their fledgling company its name. Then they purchased other farms in the vicinity in 1992 and became known to other landowners. He still clearly remembers the day Karl Eller called and asked him to lunch at Phoenix Country Club. The late Eller was an advertising
one of Ingram’s best friends. It started with a road
When Ingram began buying farmland around Maricopa, some residents thought he could be key to solving a serious problem: Maricopa Road. Community leaders like Alma Farrell,
InMaricopa.com | October 2023
October 2023 | InMaricopa.com
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